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Do you have a muscle or area of your body - the arms, shoulders or chest - that just won’t seem to grow no matter how hard you train?

If so, this highly effective training method will work wonders. It’s called an Ascending Stability Tri-Set. Here’s how it works, using the chest as an example.

Start off with the incline dumbbell press. Just do 1 set of 5-8 repetitions. Then, without resting, go straight to the barbell bench press, and do another 5-8 repetitions. Make sure to maintain good, strict technique the whole time. Once you’ve finished, move straight to the chest press machine (or Smith machine), and do another 5-8 repetitions.

So, how does this differ from any other tri-set? The reason is simple. When you use dumbbells, other muscles in the upper body have to work extra hard in order to stabilise your joints. In fact, it’s often the case that the muscles stabilising your joints “give out” before your chest. This prevents the chest muscles from being trained completely.

However, when you move to the barbell bench press, this need for the stability is reduced. This lets you push your chest muscles even harder. Even less stabilising work is needed on the chest press machine or Smith machine.

In other words, as you go from exercise to exercise, progressively less work is needed from muscles acting as stabilisers. That’s why it’s called an Ascending Stability Tri-Set - the stability of each exercise is increased gradually. This allows you to exhaust your chest muscles and develop them to their fullest.

You’ll need to do 4 or 5 sets like this, no more than once every 5-7 days. Otherwise you run the risk of overtraining. Make sure to start off with a light weight as a warm-up, and gradually progress to heavier weights by the third set. The final set should be the hardest set of all.